Page 11 of Sleeping with Her Enemy (49th Floor 2)

He thought about how to answer: Now I get a grip on myself. Now I remember who I am and what I promised Jack. Now I do right by the jilted bride, even if it kills me.

Now I remember that Amy Morrison and I hate each other.

He didn’t say any of that, though. He just held out his hand and said, “Now we walk.”

…

The minute she stepped off the ramp from the boat, Amy bent over to take off her shoes. She liked heels as much as the next girl, but she had now officially been tromping around in the killer footwear for twelve hours, and enough was enough. She had clearly won over Dax, so she didn’t think it mattered if he saw her bare feet.

“What are you doing?” he asked, his tone piqued.

“Those shoes are killing me.”

“Those shoes are killing me,” he declared. Then he looked down at her bare feet as she wriggled her toes. “But those might be worse.”

Ignoring him, she turned to look back at the skyline and cocked an ear. “So let’s hear this wave-lapping, blissfully quiet thing you supposedly have going on here.”

“If you want quiet, we have to wait for the ferry to leave.” He pointed to a stretch of grass that abutted the lake twenty or so yards from the dock. “That’s a good spot to sit.”

Without waiting for him, she strode ahead and sank into the cool grass. Dang, it smelled good. She had a lawn at her house. Why didn’t it smell this…grassy? Of course, she never sat on it like this, and she paid a landscaping company to maintain it, so she wasn’t really in a position to know.

“What are you doing?” Dax lowered himself to sit next to her.

“What am I doing what? I’m not doing anything.” The ferry’s walkway began to retract, and she realized she had really, really escaped everyone. That had been the whole point, of course, but she was truly stuck here now—at least until the next ferry. She gave Dax the side-eye. Stuck on an island with a guy she had always considered her office enemy.

“You’re doing this.” Dax started making exaggerated sniffing noises that bordered on snorting. “Do you have a cocaine habit I don’t know about?” He was mocking her. Of course he was. What did she think? That just because they’d made out on the boat, he was going to start being nice to her?

“I was smelling the grass,” she said, opting for the truth. Let him mock her. What did she care? She had nothing to prove to him. It was his turn to give her the side-eye. “It smells delicious,” she added, a touch defensively, as the ferry pulled back from the dock.

He kept inhaling, but he closed his eyes. “It does.” He continued breathing audibly and listed toward her until his face was inches from her own. Then he opened his eyes. Those weird light green eyes pinning her as if he were a superhero capable of immobilizing her. They were so pretty, those eyes. Like pale grass.

It’s possible she was still a little tipsy.

He broke eye contact and leaned even closer, touching the tip of his nose to her neck and heaving another big inhale. “And so do you.”

She wanted to lean toward him and away from him at the same time. “I what?”

“Smell good. Like strawberries.”

Right. “Uh, thanks?”

“I didn’t know they made strawberry perfume.” He sniffed once more and then pulled away. “That is perfume, right? You didn’t do some weird pre-wedding bridezilla thing where you bathed in crushed strawberries?”

She laughed. “No, it’s perfume. I always wear strawberry perfume, but normally only a little. But for the wedding I did scent layering so it’s probably still hanging on.”

“Scent layering?”

She laughed again and waved her hand dismissively. “Scent layering is a weird pre-wedding bridezilla thing. I probably read it in some stupid magazine.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you always smell like this, just not usually as intensely.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Right.” He straightened and scooted a little farther away from her. Maybe he didn’t like strawberries. Maybe he was just being polite when he’d said she smelled good. Maybe, like Mason, he thought strawberry perfume was juvenile.

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